From the French baroque of Couperin to the contemporary Hungary of Gyorgy Kurtag was the reach of Tuesday's concerts. Couperin came in the midday Coffee Concert, or rather the Couperins, because three members of the great French musical dynasty were represented in Malcolm Proud's harpsichord recital: Franτois, Louis and Armand-Louis.

Franτois may be the best known of the three (Proud played Ordres 27 and 22), but the most absorbing music on this occasion was Louis's Pavane In F Sharp Minor, which in Proud's hands sounded stately of movement and quietly piercing of expression. The playing showed this performer's familiar grand solidity, but even the gorgeously rich textures he summoned in two movements by Armand-Louis couldn't mask the fact that this late-18th-century writing was a last gasp in the repertoire of an instrument no longer attractive to the great composers.

In a concert that ran well past midnight, the Keller String Quartet from Hungary coupled excerpts from Bach's Art Of Fugue with quartets, trios and a duo by Kurtag. The programme created a dense network of interconnections, one of the central ones being the unashamedly theatrical juxtaposition of Bach's unfinished Contrapuntus 13 with Kurtag's Officium Breve.

The Kellers had earlier provided a riveting account of Gyorgy Ligeti's First Quartet, written before the composer settled in the West in 1956. They made it a veritable musical crossroads, where the Hungarian heritage, heavily indebted to Bart≤k, and Ligeti's future could be sensed with equal clarity. Bart≤k's Fourth Quartet was offered by the Dominant Quartet in a coarse-grained reading.

The German cellist Guido Schiefen made his festival debut in a solo cello programme of works by Bach, Vainberg and Reger. Schiefen is a large man who gets around the cello as easily as if it were a violin, and his double-stopping is little short of miraculous. His tone is complex in flavour, unforced and beautifully modulated. He showed a few quirks of rhythm and rubato, which kept his Bach (the First Suite) outside the highest league. But the dancing central movement of Vainberg's First Sonata was delightful, and he made Reger's Third Suite sound like music to place alongside Bach and Kodaly in the solo-cello repertoire.